Wait, a Frog has How many Genomes?
Maria Losito
Welcome to another episode of Interview with the Biologist. I'm your host, Maria Losito, and I'm joined today by Dr. Coral Zhou who is assistant professor with the Department of Molecular Biosciences at the University of Kansas. Thank you for joining me today, Coral.
Coral Zhou
Thanks for having me, Maria.
Maria Losito
in general, what can you tell us about your research interests?
Coral Zhou
So I would classify myself as a chromatin biologist. So chromatin is really the combination of our DNA plus all of the different proteins that encapsulate the DNA, that organize the DNA and perform all of these different functions with the DNA that are so important for our health. And when those functions go awry, they often result in disease. And so the main function that many people think of for the genome or for our DNA is to transcribe RNA.
And so every genome, every cell in our body, for example, has its own genome. And every cell expresses different parts of the genome as RNA, which then get translated into proteins. And so how does that happen? Right. Like a skin cell, will transcribed a different set of RNAs that instruct that cell to be a skin cell versus like a heart cell.
That heart cell will actually have a different set of RNAs. And so the way this happens is through the regulation of chromatin, which is again, the combination of all the proteins that bind the DNA. And so what we know is that the proteins will actually bind the DNA in different ways that specify which parts of the genome get exposed to the machinery that do the transcription, that make the RNAs.
And so I'm really interested in that kind of research in general. And what we know is that the way that the genome is organized in 3D space actually dictates how it gets transcribed and which regions of it are exposed to these other factors. And that's sort of in a nutshell, what I'm interested in. Yeah, I'm interested in the molecules that perform these activities, how they function, how they've evolved.
And also on the other side of things, I'm interested in how these genomes look like, imaging them and seeing how they're actually folded, for example, in 3D space, things like that.
Maria Losito
What classes do you teach at Ku? And is there one specific thing from your classes that you'd like to tell us about?
Coral Zhou
So I'm a somewhat of a new professor here, and so I haven't started officially teaching yet. However, I've been thinking a lot about this because I'm about to start in one week.
Maria Losito
Coming up, quick.
Coral Zhou
Literally, next Monday, I'll start teaching my first class ever at KU, and so I will be teaching biochem lab. So this is [BIOL]637, I believe, and it's just for biochem majors. It's usually juniors and seniors from what I've heard. And there's also an associated discussion section that we've implemented completely new this year. When I say we, I mean myself as well as Patrick Lanson, who's this amazing teaching professor here in the Department of Molecular Biosciences.
So he and I have been working together probably for about six or so months now to try to revamp this biochemistry lab, which seemed a little bit outdated. And so I'm pretty excited to introduce, you know, we have four modules that are about three weeks long each, and we've taken out two of the modules and replaced them with two new modules, which we think will modernize the course and also gear the course towards more of like my research interests, which is of course the DNA and also the enzymes that act on DNA and make different structures. So I'm pretty excited about that. Was that your question?
Maria Losito
Yeah, honestly that's perfect because just I don't know, it's amazing in a way that you've been able to update, you know, this this lab to be something that is a more modern in B that's going to fit within your into your sort of research path of genetics and give just our students a much better basis for moving on through their scholastic and eventual careers.
Coral Zhou
Yeah, absolutely. I think when I was starting to think about teaching and I was advised by the Bell chemistry faculty that it would be good to revamp the course, I immediately wanted to revamp it more according to what I'm interested in, because then it would just I think it would make me a better teacher, and I tend to get pretty excited when I talk about DNA, and I think that will probably translate through the course.
Maria Losito
Yeah, I know, like with my professors, it was always more interesting to be in a lecture or, you know, a lab adjacent. I was not a biology student when someone loved what they were talking about. It just brought an energy to the room. And to essentially your note taking that I feel had a really big impact as me on me as a student. I'm sure it'll impact your current students too
Coral Zhou
Yeah, yeah, I'm hoping so. And I'm excited to. You know, I really wanted to teach a lab, to be honest, rather than a lecture course, because I wanted there to be more interaction with the students rather than me. Just like lecturing for an hour like that doesn't. I don't really think that's my style.
Maria Losito
And I know you have quite a few students within your personal lab. Would you say that sort of the mentorship aspect is an important feature for you?
Coral Zhou
Oh, absolutely, I would say, I mean, I tell everyone this, I think when they join or when they even come to meet with me, mentorship is like as equally important to me as science and research. And it's the reason why I decided to remain in academia and move all the way out to Kansas. Right? Which was really hard for me to do because I don't know, I didn't know anyone here.
I mean, now I know you, Maria, but I think at the time it was a really difficult choice for me to make. But I was also just so excited by the opportunity to be able to have my own lab at an R1 research institute, and that KU gave me enough resources for me to do the type of research that I really want to do.
And on top of that, getting to train these students to think the way that I really like to think, and I think something that I really care about is making sure that students just not just learn, teach them how to do certain techniques, but also develop them as critical thinkers. Because I think that's ultimately when people go on the job market after they graduate.
That's what everyone wants to hire is a critical thinker, I would say, especially in this age of AI, we need people who can think on their own rather than just like take a bunch of information that's spat at them, right? So yeah, it's super important to me.
Maria Losito
A great, super important skill set. So yeah, to get into the direct reason of that, we're here today chatting. So you recently published a review paper titled ”Molecular Mechanisms of Genome Size Scaling” in a really broad way. What kind of scientific topics does that research touch on?
Coral Zhou
Yeah. So I would say this review is very special to me because it's kind of like the way that my wacky brain works. And I've been thinking about these topics for many years and realizing that no one has put two concepts together. One concept is size. And I think size is something that you can really appreciate. Anyone, not a biologist.
Anyone can appreciate the fact that when you look around the room, everything is a particular size, right? So like the microphones that we're speaking into, it's it's a particular size and it's not a random size. Right. Like the engineer that designed this microphone designed it to be a certain size so that it could function by someone speaking into it.
Right. Or like a computer monitor. You know, there's different sizes of computer monitors and they serve slightly different functions. Right. And people prefer different sizes. And so that's sort of like in the engineering world, how do we design things to be the right size. But then in biology something very similar also happens. And so I think the easiest example for people to think of is like animals.
Animals are all different sizes, right? Like you have, I don't know, elephants that are huge and giraffes that are also huge. But then you have like insects and stuff. And so I think it's something almost like a, like a five year old would imagine, like why, why can't a giraffe be like one foot tall or like, why can't this spider be the size of a giraffe?
Right? And so what we realize is that there's actually all these constraints on the evolution of size. And it's not just animal size, it's also size of things that you cannot see. So microscopic structures. And so what this review tries to do is it connects sort of the idea of size in a macroscopic way, for example animal size.
And it connects that to microscopic size and specifically genome size, because that happens to be the topic that I'm really interested in. So in a broad way it tries to connect these to extremely you would think are very different topics, but it takes some of the rules that we kind of into it from animal size scaling and tries to apply them to think about how genome sizes scale.
And when I say scaling, what I really mean is that when something is a certain size, usually there's like a scaling property. For example, if we go back to the microphone analogy, this microphone is not just a certain size, it's also a certain length times width. Right?
If you were to design a different kind of microphone, you would probably want to keep the aspect ratio somewhat similar. So then what we say is that the length actually scales to the width. As you increase width to make a bigger microphone, you would also have to proportionally increase the length. So that's what we mean by scaling is that the size of one aspect of this being actually is proportional to the size of a different aspect of that being.
Maria Losito
So would you say that a larger creature, take the giraffe that we were speaking about earlier-- Would they have a larger genome than something like a mouse, or does like the actual physical size of an animal not play into that?
Coral Zhou
Yeah, that's such a great question. And so if you look across the Tree of Life, you'll see that, you know, in general, like a human genome or a giraffe genome is going to be bigger than like a bacterial genome. And obviously humans are way bigger than bacteria. However, there's also a lot of overlap. So for example, like a plant, the biggest genome that we know of actually is a plant genome.
And it's obviously like much smaller than an elephant. Well, maybe that wasn't obvious, but it is. And an elephant does not have nearly as big of a genome as that plant genome. And so while there's like sort of a correlation, if you look at the extremes, like for example, human versus bacteria within that spectrum, there's not exactly rules for if the bigger the organism, the bigger the genome size. And once we get to talking about the frogs, we will give you another example of how that plays out.
Maria Losito
So now that we have a bit of a starting point for the research that you reviewed, can you tell us how this topic impacts what you currently do at KU?
Coral Zhou
Yeah, absolutely. So like I said, I'm really interested in DNA, interested in genomes and how they're structured and physical space. And so what I do at KU is I actually use these amazing frogs called African clawed frogs. Their genus name is Xenopus with an X, which is always cool to see a word with an ‘X’ and Xenopus are really fascinating because they were first historically developed.
I don't know if you know this. Maybe this is in my review, but they were the original pregnancy test. Really? And so even as late as like the 80s. So my mom is a doctor and she told me this actually hospitals would just have colonies of these frogs. And when a woman would go in and ask for, you know, a pregnancy test, because at the time they didn't have like a pee on the stick situation, they would collect the woman's urine and they would inject it into the frog.
And if the frog laid eggs overnight, then that means the woman was pregnant. And the reason why that would happen is because there's hormones in the woman's urine that are only produced when that person is pregnant. And so for years, this was kind of used as just a pregnancy test. And it wasn't until much later that, like the scientists were like, oh, maybe we could study this like, this seems like a kind of interesting, like, you know, situation or what we call an assay of like, oh, you can literally hormonally induce these frogs to lay all these eggs overnight.
And it wasn't that just that they laid eggs overnight. It's that if you look at the eggs, the eggs are huge. They're over a millimeter across. So when we talk about size, that's like an insane size for like a small frog. So I think they're about like ten times the size of a human egg. And of course, frogs lay eggs externally so you can look at them very easily.
And so what researchers have developed are now two kinds of methodologies with the frogs. The first methodology is that you can take the eggs from the female, and you can essentially do IVF or in vitro fertilization. So you can take testes from a male frog and basically just crush them up and then put them onto the eggs, and those eggs will fertilize.
And the nice thing about doing it in vitro is that you can synchronize these eggs and how they fertilize the timing of that. And what you see when you have the synchronous fertilization is that the embryos will develop synchronously. And what happens in the first five hours of development is that there are these, I think, 10 or 12 rounds of cell division events that occur sequentially 30 minutes after, like basically with the interval of 30 minutes.
And this is super fast. That's like almost, I think as fast as the bacteria would, would be able to replicate. And eventually what happens is that the embryos are able to turn on the expression of their own genomes. So they actually start transcribing their own RNA. So that's a process we're really interested in. But that's sort of just like all embryos and all living things.
The other methodology that was developed with Xenopus is that you can take the eggs from the mom, from the female frog, and you can actually crush them using a centrifuge. And so they lice. But then what happens is that you separate out the cytoplasm from the egg away from the egg specific things like lipids or yolk that really just provide energy for the embryo.
So you take the cytoplasm and it's really just like this, what I call egg soup, because it looks like, you know, you know, goo and it's very thick. And it has all of the proteins that are required for the embryo to survive. The first, I don't know, day or so of its life. And so what's really fascinating is that if we can study those proteins, this is such a rich source of proteins that do all these huge genome functions.
They do replication. They do, you know, repair every time a cell divides, you're literally segregating chromosomes, half of the chromosomes into one daughter cell and a half into the other. That requires a lot of molecular machines. And so you have this like huge stockpile of all of these molecules that we can study. And so that's sort of the biochemical way of using the Xenopus system.
Whereas the first thing I talked about, which is the IVF, that's more of like a developmental way. And in my lab, what we do is we do both actually, which is quite special because I would say most Frog Labs only do one or the other. And so we like to do things where we grow up embryos. And you can also basically you can sequence the genomes to look at what proteins are bound to those genomes at certain times during development.
And you can also do you can make an embryo extract, in which case you can actually isolate the genomes as a function of developmental stage. So whenever they were arrested at that stage you get the genomes out and you can look at them and do different kinds of experiments with them.
Maria Losito
Okay. Wow, that's amazing that you're able to do both within your lab. And then I was wondering, so you said that the eggs are relatively large for the size of the frog. I believe you said one millimeter. Yes. Which is still very small, but is large enough, I believe, to be able to see. Yes. Are you able to see the cell division happen with the naked eye, or is it something that you have to have a microscope to kind of follow?
Coral Zhou
Yeah. So that's a great question. So you can certainly see I would say the first cell division and also the second with your naked eye. Because what it looks like is I don't know if I should say it, but it looks like a butt.
Maria Losito
Yeah that that hard line division. Yeah. Yeah.
Coral Zhou
So you get this like kind of imagine like a squishy circular like spherical pillow and then some molecular machines inside this pillow cut the, the sphere in half. And so you have this cleavage in the middle of it. So that looks like a butt so that's very easy to see. And so what we do in the lab is like after fertilization event will sort the embryo.
So we'll take out the ones that didn't fertilize or look weird for whatever reason. And we do that under the microscope. But I'm certain that you can do that step without a microscope at all, because it's so obvious. And I think you can also see the second Division. So then it looks kind of like, I don't know, four leaf clover or something like that.
But I think after that it would probably be harder with the naked eye to distinguish between a four cell stage and maybe an eight cell stage, but honestly, I've never tried. I think if you were really young and you didn't have like, aging eyes like I do, you could probably.
Maria Losito
Do it. Fascinating. Yeah, yeah. I'm just again, so kind of caught up on the fact that frogs were one of the early pregnancy tests. I've heard about the rabbit test. I've heard about the wheat tests, which I believe, or the barley, which is like extremely early Egyptian thing.
Coral Zhou
Yeah, I heard about that, too.
Maria Losito
Never heard about frogs, though.
Coral Zhou
Frogs? Yeah. And, you know, someone must have peed on a frog.
Maria Losito
Yeah.
Coral Zhou
And just at some point.
Maria Losito
You know. Yeah, I was also I'm like, who? Who discovered this? Who discovered that pregnancy pee will make frogs lay eggs.
Coral Zhou
Yeah. I wonder if it was an accident or.
Maria Losito
You know, just someone clearing out the slop bucket back in the Middle Ages prior to a, you know, proper toilets.
Coral Zhou
It could be. Yeah. Yeah.
Maria Losito
Fascinating, and so do you know about, like, what time period the shift was from just using the frogs, as pregnancy test to focusing a little bit more on what you do as like scientific research. Yeah.
Coral Zhou
So actually I recently found the original paper that did this and let me look it up. It's either the 70s or 80s.
Maria Losito
It's a fairly recent.
Coral Zhou
Fairly recent. Yeah. So.
Coral Zhou
This paper was 1983. It was the first time where they took the cytoplasm from the egg and they added DNA to it. And then they saw in a test tube all of these basically pseudo cell division events. So they saw chromatin getting replicated. They saw chromosomes getting segregated. And yeah that was 83. Yeah. But I think for sure it was way before that that people were using Xenopus as a developmental system or they were doing the IVF and, or they could do natural mating too and then just looking at the growth of the embryos, because the embryos were so big, like all of the morphogenesis that happens during development, a lot of that was discovered
in frogs, right? Because it would be really hard to do that with a human embryo and continues to be really difficult. But if you have this huge frog embryo, you can do things where you can like cut away little pieces, which we call like X plants, and then you can watch the behavior of that little piece, which mimics what it would do in the entire embryo.
Like you can do stuff like that, like Frankenstein type stuff, or you can take a little piece from one embryo and you can transplant it onto another embryo. And then from that little piece in the second embryo, like a new head will grow out, like really wacky things like that. People were just playing. And that was kind of before the molecular revolution.
But now we really understand that the reason why these experiments worked is because there are molecules being excreted by these little pieces of tissue that then direct a big change in morphology and tissue growth and cell state specification. Yeah.
Maria Losito
That's wild. So I'm going to guess that there is a medical component to this. But breaking you know your research down for the everyday person. Why is it important that we look into genome size? And then what impact could that knowledge have for the future?
Coral Zhou
Yeah absolutely. So there's actually a huge medical component to this. So you may not know this, but if you look at the cells in your own body actually they have different genome sizes. So we are all what we call diploid. The idea that we have one copy of the genome from mom in one copy of the genome from dad.
So I would say most of our cells are like this, but there are certain tissues and it's more than you would think. Examples are the liver, the placenta and also this special kind of immune cell called the mega site, where they'll purposely, as part of their program, their natural program to do endo replication, which is where they replicate their genome, but they don't divide the cell.
So you end up with this really big cell that has this huge nucleus. That's what we call a polyploid nucleus instead of diploid, which is toon. It might be like foreign or A10. And so they're really specialized cell types in our bodies that naturally are programed to become polyploid. And they do that for a lot of different reasons.
So I believe the placenta is one of these extreme cases where there's one part of one type of cell in the placenta. That's literally just like a giant cell with lots of nuclei inside. And it's a little bit unclear to me why it does that. But what I've sort of read and this isn't really my field, but what I sort of read is that you want to make sure that this part of the placenta is really leak proof.
And so if you have the option of making a tissue with like 1000 smaller cells versus one giant cell, you might think that with a thousand smaller cells, the cell cell junctions might be leaky to material. Who knows what it is? Again, not my field, but if you again, if you replace the thousand cells with one large cell, there's a lot less surface area that can potentially leak.
And so there are certain functions that are really the reason why these cells become polyploid. So that's sort of like in normal cells. But then we have disease stage cells. So we have aging cells for example. So I believe the cells in your cornea or lens or one of those things in your eye, they actually get damaged over time.
And then they sinesce or age and they actually become polyploid and they exit the cell cycle. And I believe the reason for that is that basically when you age, like in general, our bodies are less good at rejuvenating, at doing more cell division. We have less stem cell capacity and stuff like that. But if you just become polyploid and exit the cell cycle, you have this giant cell that you can cover a lot of ground, a lot of area, and you can kind of just leave the cell cycle and not have to deal with things.
So. So yeah, there's there's that aging example. And then there's also cancer is is sort of the prime example that I probably think about the most. So people have done a lot of sequencing studies where they take human tumors from all different stages of tumor genesis, and they sequence them and they what they found is that they can separate the tumors into two groups.
One group in which these tumors did not have any whole genome duplications. So they remain diploid in another group where they did have whole genome duplication. So they become tetraploid, 4N or even off octoploid, 8N. And so what they see is if they plot survivability of these two different groups, they see that the patients that had whole genome duplicated tumors actually had a worse survival.
So they actually died earlier in general than the patients that did not have these polyploid genomes. And so what we think this means is that somehow the polyploidy in this disease state of cancer is allowing these tumor cells to innovate new functions and to kind of bypass some of the things that would naturally kill them if they hadn't been polyploid.
And so it's it's sort of like evolution happening. But in our bodies, if we're sick, if we have cancer, you know, these cancer cells are kind of competing with our own cells to, to survive, to metastasize, to take over. And if they and what this study shows is that the ones, the cancer cells that tend to win, that tend to cause patient death, are also the ones that have been polyploid and that have become polyploid during their trajectory of cancer cell evolution.
So I think that that's sort of so what we know to summarize is that polyploidy happens naturally in our bodies in order to get more functions out of the same genome. But they also polyploidy also happens in disease states like aging and cancer. And so what we're really hoping is that in our frog system, I don't think I mentioned this yet, but we can actually do two really cool things related to genome size and ploidity.
So in case I haven't defined it yet, so ploidty is really the number of genome copies that you have. So when I talk about a cell or an animal being polyploid, it has more than the normal copies. So more than just one set from mom, one set from dad. So you might have like a tetraploid, where you have two sets of chromosomes from dad and two sets from mom, something like that.
So with the frogs, what we know is that through natural evolution, the frogs have used polyploidy as a way to speciate. And so in the lab we have well, now not yet, but we will eventually have different ploidy frogs. So for example, Xenopus tropicalis in the lab is a diploid frog and it likes to live in the warm climates.
All these frogs are actually from different regions of Africa. And then laevis, which is our normal frog that we use most of the time, is a tetraploid. So it's 4N And then we're also very excited to receive this longipes frogs and Xenopus Longepides to start that colony in the fall. And that's a dodecahedron. So it has its 12N which is really wild.
And so that's one thing we can do in the lab, is to compare these different frog species and look at their different molecules, their genes, and see how have they adapted to these big changes in ploidy, and we hope that those lessons, those strategies that we get from the frogs will also help us treat things like cancer or aging.
Because if we know that a frog adapted this way, maybe the tumor cells are also adapting that way, and we can as a therapeutic, take away that strategy in a molecular kind of therapeutic way, and then maybe that will kill off the cancer cells more easily. But then the other thing we can do, which I think is super fascinating too, is that you can take a single species of frog, and during the IVF step, you can do a couple of just minor changes to your protocol, and you can make frogs of different ploidys.
And so you can take for example, a laevis embryo which is a 4N And when you do the IVF you can either do it normally, in which case it would be one chromosome from mom, one from dad. We call that one X-ploidy, Or what you can do is before you add the sperm onto the eggs, you can irradiate the sperm with UV light, strong UV light, which will basically cross-link all of the paternal, the paternal DNA that's in the sperm and make it completely unusable so the sperm can still fertilize the eggs.
But then the genome is completely dead. So you end up with these tadpoles, basically, that have only chromosomes from mom. So that we call that a 0.5 x situation. And then on the flip side you can do a normal fertilization, but then you can cold shock the embryo shortly after the sperm enter. And you do like a 15 minute cold bath, in which case that allows the polar body that's usually extruded from the embryo, it allows it to be retained.
And so now you have two copies of chromosomes from mom and one copy from dad. And we call that a 1.5 x situation. So between 0.5 x and 1.5 x. And then of course we have the normal one x. That's a three fold change in ploidy, And so we can do these perturbations in the lab with the same mom and dad pair.
And we can ask like how does this embryo actually adapt to this change in ploidy And that sort of mimics sort of like what happens in nature. So how do you get a polyploid organism in the first place? There must have been some kind of mistake or something that happened in which this embryo ended up with another copy of the genome.
And so we're kind of mimicking that in the lab and actually asking very systematically, how does the genome actually adapt? What are the molecules involved.
Maria Losito
That's wild. And I guess I'm kind of wondering, in a embryo that ends up as a point 5 to 1.5, do you see any like changes within their development that comes from having more or less genome from the parent?
Coral Zhou
Yeah. So there are definitely some changes. So first of all, the 1.5 x embryos, the ones with two copies from mom and one from dad, they actually grow completely normally in terms of developmental rate. They look the same in the end. I don't think anyone has really characterized the differences very carefully, but in general they look the same.
The point five x, they actually all die around the tadpole stage, and I don't think it's very clear why. But certainly what it means is that either the genome size is not big enough to accommodate all of the activities of the cells, or you needed dad's DNA. There was like something special about dad's DNA that you needed in order for this animal to survive, which is, I think, not the case. Like, there are certainly organisms out there where they just need mom's DNA and they're fine.
Maria Losito
Yeah, I think there's, I believe other frog species that are capable of self fertilization, and it's just only mom who's progressing essentially the species.
Coral Zhou
Right. So it could it could be a mom dad thing or it could be a genome size thing. We don't really know. It would be interesting in figure that out. So what the weird thing though is okay, so I don't know if I've talked about this concept yet, but it's in the review. So what we see across biology and we see these huge differences in genome size.
So there's about a six order of magnitude difference between the smallest genome which is a bacterial genome in the in the largest genome which is a plant genome. But what we see pretty consistently, although there are some exceptions, is that the amount of DNA. So your genome size actually scales with nuclear size, which also scales would cell size.
So that means that an animal, for example a frog that has a bigger genome. So for example, this longipes that I talked about which is a dodecahedron, it has a bigger genome. It also has a bigger nucleus, which I guess makes sense because you need a bigger house to contain all of your DNA, but it also has bigger cells.
And so what we see is that in this 1.5 x situation, if we go back to just Leavis as the species we're talking about, the scaling relationship is upheld. So the 1.5 x embryos, as they develop at a certain point in development, they also start having bigger nuclei and bigger cells compared to the one X that were fertilized at the same time from the same mom dad pair.
And so there are certain people who are really interested in that, and they're working on trying to understand the mechanism of how are these cells bigger. But the really kind of funny thing about it is that the tissue size and the body size stays the same. And so if you look at like a 1.5 x brain tissue, for example, like they actually have the same exact brain size compared to the one x frog, but they actually have bigger cells.
And so that means the same size tissue in the 1.5 x frog is made up of less cells compared to the one x. And the same rule applies for the longipes frog, which is a dodecaploid. It's actually funny because that frog is way smaller than the laevis frog, which is the tetraploid, and so the small longipies frog has a bigger genome, but it has a way smaller body size, so also way smaller tissue size.
So each of these tissues is made up of fewer larger cells compared to the laevis frog. And so people are pretty interested in understanding if you have the same tissue, but it's made out of less cells, how does that change the function of that tissue. So these are some of the sort of interesting questions that come up when you think about size in this way.
Maria Losito
Thank you for joining us today, Coral. I mean, I really appreciate you taking the time and giving us a deeper look into your research. And then the scientific world of frogs at large.
Coral Zhou
I had a great time chatting with you, Maria. Thank you for inviting me.
Maria Losito
And thank you for listening to interview with a biologist. You can check out the show notes for more information about Doctor Zhou's work, as well as a link to the research paper discussed in this episode. A full transcript of this episode will be available at biology.ku.edu.
Research Paper Discussed in Todays' Episode: https://journals.biologists.com/jcs/article-lookup/doi/10.1242/jcs.264429